Jesus, the Christ and Confucius have spoken highly of the minds of children. Is it the curiosity, inquiry and open-mindedness? Now, here is the second story. This one is for you to wonder at. At night when there are no clouds you can look up through the evening sky at what is it most would say they see? Nearly everyone would say that they see stars and the moon, if it is visible from their position at the time. Now, when asked what are those stars?
Many people would be able to answer that the suns are emitting light as they turn hydrogen into helium in a process that emits enormous amount of energy, a good part in the form of photons of light. And when asked what name do most people give to what they are looking out into at might? This is the story that many of us have come to believe.
We look out into space and see many suns. We know however that those little specks of twinkling light are very, very far away. In fact, we are taught that they are so far away that the distance cannot be measured as we normally do for the numbers would be so large. To make it easier the distances that the stars and galaxies are from earth are measured in light-years. A light —year is the distance light travels in one year.
Light moves at over , miles per second-some velocity! So, the light we see that we associate with a star at night has been traveling for some time to get to your eyeball. One star is 70 million light years away. A galaxy may be million light years away. Another star might be million light years away and another 23 million and another , light years from earth. Another galaxy may be 5 billion light years away. Now since it takes quite a while for the light to reach earth by the time it does arrive at you eyeball the source of the light might not even exist anymore.
A star may have gone into a nova or supernova, burnt out, or been merged into a black hole! A galaxy may have merged with another in a cosmic collision.
This compensation does not influence our school rankings, resource guides, or other editorially-independent information published on this site. Got it! Skip to primary navigation Skip to main content Skip to primary sidebar Skip to footer History of Philosophy. AD SuperScholar. Friedrich Schelling developed a unique form of Idealism known as Aesthetic Idealism in which he argued that only art was able to harmonize and sublimate the contradictions between subjectivity and objectivity, freedom and necessity, etc , and also tried to establish a connection or synthesis between his conceptions of nature and spirit.
Arthur Schopenhauer is also usually considered part of the German Idealism and Romanticism movements, although his philosophy was very singular. He was a thorough-going pessimist who believed that the "will-to-life" the drive to survive and to reproduce was the underlying driving force of the world, and that the pursuit of happiness, love and intellectual satisfaction was very much secondary and essentially futile.
He saw art and other artistic, moral and ascetic forms of awareness as the only way to overcome the fundamentally frustration-filled and painful human condition. The greatest and most influential of the German Idealists , though, was Georg Hegel.
Although his works have a reputation for abstractness and difficulty , Hegel is often considered the summit of early 19th Century German thought, and his influence was profound. He extended Aristotle 's process of dialectic resolving a thesis and its opposing antithesis into a synthesis to apply to the real world - including the whole of history - in an on-going process of conflict resolution towards what he called the Absolute Idea.
However, he stressed that what is really changing in this process is the underlying "Geist" mind, spirit, soul , and he saw each person's individual consciousness as being part of an Absolute Mind sometimes referred to as Absolute Idealism. Karl Marx was strongly influenced by Hegel 's dialectical method and his analysis of history. His Marxist theory including the concepts of historical materialism , class struggle , the labor theory of value , the bourgeoisie , etc , which he developed with his friend Friedrich Engels as a reaction against the rampant Capitalism of 19th Century Europe, provided the intellectual base for later radical and revolutionary Socialism and Communism.
A very different kind of philosophy grew up in 19th Century England , out of the British Empiricist tradition of the previous century. The doctrine of Utilitarianism is a type of Consequentialism an approach to Ethics that stresses an action's outcome or consequence , which holds that the right action is that which would cause "the greatest happiness of the greatest number".
Mill refined the theory to stress the quality not just the quantity of happiness, and intellectual and moral pleasures over more physical forms. He counseled that coercion in society is only justifiable either to defend ourselves, or to defend others from harm the "harm principle". Ralph Waldo Emerson established the Transcendentalism movement in the middle of the century, rooted in the transcendental philosophy of Kant , German Idealism and Romanticism , and a desire to ground religion in the inner spiritual or mental essence of humanity, rather than in sensuous experience.
Emerson 's student Henry David Thoreau further developed these ideas, stressing intuition , self-examination , Individualism and the exploration of the beauty of nature.
Thoreau 's advocacy of civil disobedience influenced generations of social reformers. The other main American movement of the late 19th Century was Pragmatism , which was initiated by C. Peirce and developed and popularized by William James and John Dewey. The theory of Pragmatism is based on Peirce 's pragmatic maxim , that the meaning of any concept is really just the same as its operational or practical consequences essentially, that something is true only insofar as it works in practice.
Peirce also introduced the idea of Fallibilism that all truths and "facts" are necessarily provisional , that they can never be certain but only probable. James , in addition to his psychological work, extended Pragmatism , both as a method for analyzing philosophic problems but also as a theory of truth , as well as developing his own versions of Fideism that beliefs are arrived at by an individual process that lies beyond reason and evidence and Voluntarism that the will is superior to the intellect and to emotion among others.
Dewey 's interpretation of Pragmatism is better known as Instrumentalism , the methodological view that concepts and theories are merely useful instruments , best measured by how effective they are in explaining and predicting phenomena, and not by whether they are true or false which he claimed was impossible. Dewey 's contribution to Philosophy of Education and to modern progressive education particularly what he called "learning-by-doing" was also significant.
But European philosophy was not limited to the German Idealists. The French sociologist and philosopher Auguste Comte founded the influential Positivism movement around the belief that the only authentic knowledge was scientific knowledge , based on actual sense experience and strict application of the scientific method. Comte saw this as the final phase in the evolution of humanity , and even constructed a non-theistic, pseudo-mystical "positive religion" around the idea.
He too was a kind of Fideist and an extremely religious man despite his attacks on the Danish state church. But his analysis of the way in which human freedom tends to lead to "angst" dread , the call of the infinite , and eventually to despair , was highly influential on later Existentialists like Heidegger and Sartre. The German Nietzsche was another atypical, original and controversial philosopher, also considered an important forerunner of Existentialism.
He challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality famously asserting that "God is dead" , leading to charges of Atheism , Moral Skepticism , Relativism and Nihilism.
An important precursor of the Analytic Philosophy tradition was the Logicism developed during the late 19th Century by Gottlob Frege. Logicism sought to show that some, or even all , of mathematics was reducible to Logic , and Frege 's work revolutionized modern mathematical Logic.
In the early 20th Century, the British logicians Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead continued to champion his ideas even after Russell had pointed out a paradox exposing an inconsistency in Frege 's work, which caused him, Frege , to abandon his own theory.
Russell and Whitehead 's monumental and ground-breaking book, "Principia Mathematica" was a particularly important milestone. Both Russell and Whitehead went on to develop other philosophies. Russell 's work was mainly in the area of Philosophy of Language , including his theory of Logical Atomism and his contributions to Ordinary Language Philosophy. Whitehead developed a metaphysical approach known as Process Philosophy , which posited ever-changing subjective forms to complement Plato 's eternal forms.
Their Logicism , though, along with Comte 's Positivism , was a great influence on the development of the important 20th Century movement of Logical Positivism.
The Logical Positivists campaigned for a systematic reduction of all human knowledge down to logical and scientific foundations , and claimed that a statement can be meaningful only if it is either purely formal essentially, mathematics and logic or capable of empirical verification.
In the s, A. Ayer was largely responsible for the spread of Logical Positivism to Britain, even as its influence was already waning in Europe. The "Tractatus" of the young Ludwig Wittgenstein , published in , was a text of great importance for Logical Positivism. Indeed, Wittgenstein has come to be considered one of the 20th Century's most important philosophers , if not the most important.
A central part of the philosophy of the "Tractatus" was the picture theory of meaning , which asserted that thoughts , as expressed in language, "picture" the facts of the world, and that the structure of language is also determined by the structure of reality. However, Wittgenstein abandoned his early work, convinced that the publication of the "Tractatus" had solved all the problems of all philosophy.
They break them down into their parts and then build them back up again and combine them in new ways. In addition to analysis, philosophers reflect on what goes on in the mind and the world; they seek wisdom through intuitions of whole structures of thought or experience.
In the West, the scientific aspect of philosophy, or abstract general thought about the natural and human worlds, began in ancient Greece in the seventh century b. Between the Pre-Socratics and Socrates, the Sophists were the first to focus on the human world, although their methods were adversarial and perhaps unethical.
They were paid for their arguments, without concern about their truth or the justice of what they were arguing for. With Socrates' activities in the fifth century b. The two big subjects of the natural world and the human world endured as the concerns of philosophers, well after the physical and social sciences branched out on their own.
These subjects are also perennial in ordinary life. Philosophy is the only way to come close to answers to important questions that no amount of observation can resolve. For example, philosophy strives to answer questions such as: "What is the right thing to do if there are 10 people in a lifeboat that can only hold six safely?
Generally, the kind of wisdom philosophers love consists of answers to questions, which have to be worked out in the mind instead of discovered through microscopes, telescopes, surveys, or measurement. For example, a sociologist will study what people believe, but a philosopher will ask if those beliefs are true or justified by what is true.
Because philosophical questions cannot be answered with facts, their answers are largely a matter of opinion.
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